A Plugin-Based Framework for Domain Models and Persistence in Environmental Management Information Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we present an open source framework that supports the implementation of persistable domain models in dynamic plugin-based architectures on Microsoft .NET. The framework includes a domain model service that allows plugins to provide new domain types to other plugins as well as to use, extend, and observe domain objects contributed by other plugins. Furthermore, a persistence service is provided as an abstraction from concrete repository implementations. The paper discusses our solutions to the challenges of persistence in dynamic architectures, presents an exemplary domain-specific language for material flow analysis, and compares our work to related approaches from the common software platforms .NET and Eclipse. Though the framework is in principle application- independent, we apply it primarily in the context of environmental management information systems.